A bloodline in world's most populous country waits 200 years for its first baby girl
A family in India's Maharashtra state brought a newborn girl home in a flower-decked chariot in late August, celebrating what it says is its first daughter in roughly 200 years.
The Dahiphale family in Parli, Beed District, celebrated the birth of their first girl child in four generations, named Gargi, the Indo-Asian News Service reported. Beed's child sex ratio, the number of girls per 1,000 boys aged 0 to 6, had plummeted from 894 in the 2001 census to around 800 a decade later, the steepest decline in any district in Maharashtra.
Kalpana Dahiphale, the baby's mother, was discharged from the hospital two days after giving birth, as were her husband Rishikesh and daughter. The family welcomed Gargi with drumbeats, cymbals, fireworks, and sweet treats like jalebi at their home in Indiranagar. The baby's grandfather, Limbaji Dahiphale, headmaster of Bhagwan Primary School, expressed his joy at finally having a daughter after years of regret.
His wife Surekha hailed the newborn as the household's Lakshmi Devi, a reference to the Hindu goddess of wealth and fortune. The procession through the neighborhood drew crowds, challenging narrow attitudes surrounding the birth of girls in some parts of Indian society. The campaign Lek Laadki Abhiyan, which ran decoy operations against doctors performing illegal sex determination tests in the district, was one of eight in Maharashtra targeted by this effort.
Advocate Varsha Deshpande, the founder of Lek Laadki Abhiyan, received the 2025 United Nations Population Award for her decades-long work. Prenatal sex determination has been illegal in India since 1994, but the spread of ultrasound technology led to the creation of "missing girls," with India accounting for 45.8 million of the 142.6 million worldwide, according to the UNFPA's 2020 State of World Population report.
India's sex ratio at birth currently stands at 929 girls per 1,000 boys, and the country remains the world's most populous with an estimated 1.46 billion people.
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